Families of Sept. 11 victims prepare for Guantanamo arraignment

NEW YORK — Nearly 11 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, family members of some of the victims will watch via closed-circuit TV on Saturday as the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks and four co-defendants are arraigned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I want to bear witness that in fact these people are brought to justice,” said Al Santora, whose firefighter son Christopher died at the World Trade Center.

APA person walks towards the security gate at Fort Hamilton, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, check vehicles as they enter the base Saturday. Families who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, will be able enter the base and watch the arraignment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that will be broadcast on closed-circuit TV to Fort Hamilton, Fort Meade, Md., and Fort Dix, N.J.

Santora and his wife, Maureen, plan to watch the arraignment of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed and the others at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where others began gathering Saturday morning for a live broadcast of the hearing for victims’ family members, survivors and emergency personnel who responded to the attacks. The fort is one of four military bases where the proceeding will be shown. Others are Fort Devens in Massachusetts and Joint Base McGuire Dix in New Jersey. Only the fourth, Fort Meade in Maryland, is open to the public.

Mohammed and the others are expected to be arraigned on charges that include terrorism and murder. They could get the death penalty if convicted in the attacks that sent hijacked airliners slamming into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The trial is probably at least a year away.

Six victims’ families chosen by lottery traveled to Guantanamo to see the arraignment in person.

Alan Linton of Frederick, Md., who lost his son Alan Jr., an investment banker, at the World Trade Center, said he and his wife put their names in the lottery for the Cuba trip but they aren’t interested in watching a video feed of the arraignment.

“That’s just not the same as being there to me,” Linton said. “Going to Fort Meade, it’s kind of like watching television.”

AP, 2003Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shortly after his capture during a 2003 raid in Pakistan.

Whether they plan to watch or not, family members expressed frustration that it’s taken so long to bring the Sept. 11 conspirators to justice.

The administration of President Barack Obama dropped earlier military-commission charges against them when it decided in late 2009 to try them in federal court in New York. But Congress blocked the civilian trials amid opposition to bringing the defendants to U.S. soil, especially to a courthouse located just blocks from the trade center site.

Santora said he hopes the trial can proceed quickly once it starts.

“They have tons and tons of evidence and they’ve already admitted their guilt,” he said. “So I don’t know why the trial should be long.”

Retired firefighter Jim Riches, whose son was also a firefighter who died at the trade center, said some of victims’ parents did not live long enough to see the trial.